The task of improving and designing efficient and reliable RF systems for the noise-resistant transmission of moving video aerial scenes, especially from remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) to ground stations, motivates an increasing interest in suitable techniques for reducing the bit rate in the digital TV baseband. Major candidate techniques, as reviewed by Camana (1979, IEEE Spectrum 16, 24-29) are based on transform or DPCM image coding, operating at the range of approximately 1 to 2 bits per picture element (pel), transmitted either at the standard or a lower TV frame rate.
As aerial scenes transmitted at standard frame rate, e.g. 25 frame/s, often show a largely overlapping image content of subsequent frames, the use of a lower frame rate is capable of providing low-complex, efficient transmissions with a relatively high degree of bit rate reduction, such as by a factor of 25 or more. However, to the human eye, the frame-to-frame discontinuity of the displayed scene movement (jerkiness), usually present in frame-repeated images, is annoying. On the other hand, the scene movement during the interval between successive transmitted frames is largely determined, so that a priori knowledge exists which can be utilized for a regeneration of the continuous scene movement in the received image sequence.